WASHINGTON—More than 40,000 federal workers have accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer so far, with the final figure expected to be much higher.
Late on Feb. 5, unnamed White House officials told The Wall Street Journal that 40,000 of the 2.3 million federal civil servants had accepted the offer, but another senior administration official told The Epoch Times on the morning of Feb. 6 that the current figure is considerably higher.
“That 40,000 figure was as of yesterday,” the official said. “The number has grown but we aren’t sharing additional numbers until after the deadline.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later confirmed the figure, saying, “It’s going to save the American people tens of millions of dollars, and we encourage federal workers in this city to accept the very generous offer.”
The offer in return for the workers’ resignation promises eight months of pay and benefits, through the end of September 2025.
Among President Donald Trump’s first executive orders after his inauguration was a requirement for all federal workers to stop working from home and return to their official duty stations. The order reflected the fact that in major department and agency headquarters buildings in Washington, 10 percent or fewer of the employees work from the office.
Every federal agency has to tell the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which administers the multiple federal retirement systems in operation, how many government workers are taking the buyout offer. As a result, the actual final total may not be available until after Feb. 7 because of potential delays in OPM getting all of the needed information and the time required to begin the administrative processing of each retirement.
The Trump administration’s buyout offer is a key part of its promised plan to reduce the size and cost of the federal government. Trump recruited billionaire space and electric vehicle entrepreneur Elon Musk to head the effort, which is officially known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The buyout offer is needed because of the regulatory obstacles that make firing employees in the government far more tedious and costly than in the private sector. Under the current system, more than 18 months on average are required to terminate such a worker, but the actual time involved can easily stretch significantly longer.
If 10 percent of the civilian workforce accepted the buyout offer, it would cut spending by more than $24 billion. According to OPM data, the government’s turnover rate is 6 percent to 8 percent in a typical year.
The buyout offer allows federal workers who have accepted it to receive full pay and benefits coverage for eight months, exempts them from newly issued orders to return to work at their official duty stations on a daily basis, and protects them against reduction-in-force processes that are expected to begin in the near future in many federal departments and agencies.
A career employee at the Social Security Administration, who asked not to be identified, told The Epoch Times on Feb. 6 that employees there have been talking about the buyout offer, but he said that he does not expect a flood of acceptances.
“I’m thinking the final number of people who take the retirement offer will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 6 percent,” he said. “It probably won’t be higher than that because there is a lot of deadwood in the government.”
Opposition to the Trump administration’s buyout offer has been intense, especially at the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union, with 800,000 members. Officials there opposed the buyout offer from Jan. 28, the first day it was offered, and have strongly encouraged civil servants to reject the offer.
Similarly, officials with the Federal Managers Association (FMA), which represents the interests of 200,000 managers, supervisors, and executives in the civil service, immediately opposed the offer.
“We vehemently oppose this frightening, misguided program aimed at nearly the entire federal workforce,” the FMA said in a Jan. 29 statement. “It is unprecedented, impulsive, and dangerous.
“It jeopardizes national security, food safety, and threatens the customer service to all American taxpayers from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and every other agency that provides critical, congressionally mandated services to the country.”
A spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees declined to comment, and FMA did not respond to a request for comment.
